The resistance movement

December 19, 2011 Planning & Development, Toronto Neighbourhoods, West Toronto Real Estate

Five years ago it seemed the gentrification of Parkdale was inevitable. So why hasn’t it happened?

Danielle Groen – The Grid

The lights are dim and the volume inches higher at Parkdale’s new restaurant, Grand Electric. Bill Withers is stuffed back into an album sleeve, replaced on the turntable by Dr. Dre’s The Chronic; in the crook of the L-shaped bar, two guys in their early 30s remind each other of the lyrics. It’s a Wednesday in late November, opening night, and everyone is crowded dark-denim-knee to dark-denim-knee. There are more than a dozen bourbons lined up on wood shelves and as many Mexican dishes scrawled on the blackboard: tacos, pozole, pollo frito. At a red picnic table near the restaurant’s window, a group of six demolishes the entire menu.

So this is the new Parkdale, right? It’s the hip, well-heeled fulfilment of a prophecy written six years ago on the yellow stuccoed wall of a Starbucks seven blocks east: “Drake you ho, this is all your fault.” As soon as the Drake and Gladstone made themselves over and lured that green-mermaid beacon of gentrification, it was only a matter of time before the bistros and boutiques crept west past Dufferin, under Queen Street’s CN bridge, and reached into gritty Parkdale.

Toronto Life first spotted gentrification’s fingerprints back in 2005. In an article on Parkdale’s changing landscape, the magazine crowed, “Queen Street’s wild western frontier is prettying itself up faster than you can say yee-haw!” A year later, the Parkdale Liberty Economic Development Corporation partnered with Ryerson’s fourth-year urban planning students on a study called “Managing Gentrification in Parkdale.” And in early 2007, local politicians and city thinkers gathered at the library to ponder the same, in a discussion titled “Where goes the neighbourhood?”

But so far, the shiny condos, which have come to dominate the eastern side of the underpass, haven’t been built. Parkdale’s social-service hubs remain—almost two dozen of them, in an area roughly bordered by Roncesvalles and Dufferin, the train tracks north of Queen and the lake. Step outside Grand Electric on a late November night and you’ll find a pawnshop immediately to the left. Along the same stretch, there are bright coffee houses and Asian grocery stores, a multicultural association and a Franciscan food-service ministry, a jewellery studio, dentist’s office and a knitting café. There’s a legal-aid clinic and a community health centre in the basement of which, this spring, a food co-op will open—Toronto’s first in 28 years.

“In the last four years, there was a lot of talk about what’s going to happen to Parkdale,” says Heather Douglas, executive director of the neighbourhood’s business improvement area. “We’ve seen some change, but nowhere near to the extent that everybody predicted.” Alan Walks, a geography and planning professor at U of T, agrees: “Parkdale is still one of the areas that is slow to be affected by the onslaught of gentrification in the inner city of Toronto.”

What happened here? Parkdale’s gentrification, it seems, was cut off mid-yee-haw; the westward march of Queen Street didn’t quite breach Dufferin.

But because of the architecture that Parkdale was given, and the stubbornness that Parkdalians bring, something else has taken place. It’s not exactly gentrification—instead, it’s a more inclusive kind of evolution, one that reflects and caters to the diversity of this neighbourhood’s residents and encourages them to stay put.

In its classic form, gentrification occurs when the social makeup of a neighbourhood transforms from working class to middle class and higher. That’s often seen through the deconversion of rental housing: Nice old buildings, built originally for owner occupation then turned into rental units, are reclaimed by owners once more. A broader view of gentrification would include new condominiums or former warehouses transformed into lofts, since they create space for middle- and upper-class residents, as well. Either way, lower-income renters are out of luck.

There are signs of classic gentrification in the neighbourhood. “Above Queen, especially west of Lansdowne—that area has changed very much,” U of T’s Walks says. “The housing is low-rise on beautiful streets, and a lot of the rentals there have been changed into owner-occupied houses.” Along the side streets north of Queen, Bugaboo strollers now appear about as often as shopping carts.

I live on the second floor of a lovely, creaky Victorian row house near the Parkdale LCBO (location!), and I’ve been known to panic that every improvement my landlord makes to the place is a troubling sign she wants to move back in. But then I reassure myself by softly repeating: Parkdale is a community of tenants. Some 77% of us rent our housing, compared to a city-wide average of 32%. In South Parkdale, below Queen, that number climbs to 91%. Tenants are here because the architecture exists for them here: there are low- and high-rise apartment buildings, bachelorettes and enormous mansions that were divided into units almost a century ago.

“If the dominant stock for rentals is maintained in its current form, then the general social composition is likely to maintain, as well,” says Walks. He cites the mid-rise, high-density apartment complexes along Jameson Avenue—those sandy-brick boxes that sprouted up in the ’50s and ’60s—as an anchor for Parkdale’s low-income residents. Known locally as “the landing strip,” Jameson has provided the first home for waves of new immigrants. In the 1980s, West Indians and Tamils came; in the late 1990s, Tibetans did, and now they number almost 2,000 in Parkdale. Three years ago, thousands of Roma joined them, fleeing violence in Hungary. Community identity is strong here: In 2009, a public art project snapped 250 black-and-white headshots of Jameson’s residents and tiled them onto tree planters that line the busy street.

There’s the danger that a condo behemoth or two could disrupt all that. But ward councillor Gord Perks thinks it’s an unlikely scenario. “Those apartments are built on very tight sites, so you couldn’t knock them down and put in something bigger,” he says. The community has also taken active steps to ensure that housing remains for its lower-income residents. The Parkdale Pilot Project, a decade-long municipal program that legalized rooming houses in Toronto, was completed in 2009, with almost 80 houses licensed and improved. Because of that, Perks says, “we’ve created a housing stock which means that close to 1,000 people can’t be dehoused by the marketplace.”

Had housing stock turned over and been replaced by glass condos for the upwardly mobile, Walks says, “You would’ve seen a lot of new businesses move into Parkdale.” The recession has, unquestionably, played a role in slowing that development. But there’s another reason that it has been difficult for bars and restaurants (and bars masquerading as restaurants) to find a toehold. “Gord Perks is playing a very, very active role in terms of new liquor licences,” Parkdale BIA executive director Heather Douglas says.

Exactly how active? Every time a liquor licence is applied for, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario notifies the city; councillors may then declare the licence to be against municipal interest. Perks does that every time. Generally, licences are still granted, but not before he has sculpted some conditions; Kanji Sushi, a restaurant being built on Queen, saw 13 stipulations added to its liquor licence. Among them: no audible noise after 11 p.m. and, aside from special occasions, no cover charge.

That’s not to say that Queen Street hasn’t become noticeably louder and more crowded, especially on weekend nights. Last year, Perks confessed to The Globe and Mail that he was concerned Parkdale would become the next West Queen West. But his fears have since abated. Or at least, he tells me, “It will be a long time coming, and over my dead body.”

My friends are mostly east-enders now. They live in nicely appointed if architecturally unmemorable houses; they get their cheese and coffee beans in Leslieville. None of them is really any closer to the downtown core than I am, but sometimes it can be tricky to entice them under the Queen Street bridge, even if dinner and drinks await on the other side. Occasionally, a mild joke is made about what else might await them there, too.

“There’s still that stigma of, ‘Why would I go to Parkdale?’” confirms the BIA’s Douglas. “‘It’s all drugs, prostitution, violence.’” Samten Tsering, owner of Tsampa Café, arrived in the neighbourhood from Tibet 10 years ago. At that time, he recalls, “I heard there were a lot of drug dealers, drug users, street hookers. I hear that still. But it’s not true! I don’t see it.”

Toronto Police sergeant Jeff Zammit has patrolled Parkdale, on and off, for 24 years; he says friends and family continue to raise an eyebrow when he mentions where he works. “They’ll go, ‘Ooooh, that’s a bad area,’” he says. But by what metric is safety measured? If it’s crime, then rates are down in Parkdale—by the end of 2010, the annual number of sexual assaults had dropped from the previous year, and instances of theft, breaking and entering, robbery and assault had plummeted by two-thirds. Crime certainly hasn’t vanished here: It remains a dense neighbourhood with the inevitable big-city problems. But across Toronto, the decline of those same rates is measured mostly in single digits.

And if it’s drugs, then the composition of drug users has also changed. While they are still a presence in Parkdale, according to Zammit, marijuana has largely replaced crack. “It’s a softer drug, so what we call our ‘clientele’ is a lot softer to deal with than your hard-nosed crackhead,” he says. “We have to dig to find crack use. Parkdale is very safe.”

There is a distance, then, that exists between the way Parkdale can be perceived by people who don’t live or work within its boundaries and the way it is experienced by those who do. The CN underpass along Queen Street doesn’t just serve as the physical barrier to Parkdale—it presents a psychological barrier, as well: a scarcely lit, usually puddled strip that promises the same kind of sketchiness on its western side. That can intimidate families, who might prefer to put down roots in Roncesvalles or the Junction.

But the distance between the perception of Parkdale and the reality has been present since the village was first incorporated in 1879. Conventional wisdom holds that the neighbourhood began as Rosedale’s lakeside analogue, a leafy suburb supplied with expansive mansions that catered to the über-rich. Only Parkdale never was a tony enclave—it may have promoted itself that way to the press and potential land buyers, but its demographics were, from the outset, far more mixed. Because of its proximity to train tracks and factories, half of Parkdale’s first households were actually working class; the most common occupation at the time was “railwayman.”

In the 1970s, thousands of mental-health patients were discharged en masse from Toronto’s institutions, and more than half of them found their way from the nearby Queen Street Mental Health Centre to Parkdale. This is usually held up as the catalyst of the neighbourhood’s fall from grace; as the Toronto Star’s Joe Fiorito writes, “We opened the doors of our various asylums and let people fend for themselves. So began the rapid conversion of our once-grand mansions into rooming houses.”

But plenty of those once-grand mansions were already gone. In the early 20th century, as clerks, carpenters and seamstresses moved in, many of the area’s estates—then considered too large for single, servantless families—were refashioned into multiple-unit flats. When workers streamed into the city during the world wars, that housing conversion only accelerated; by 1951, a full 70% of the neighbourhood’s former single-family dwellings had been parcelled into apartments. De-institutionalized patients chose Parkdale because rooming houses already existed for them there.

Parkdale has never been an easy place to accurately define. But saddled with a stigma that makes too much of its precipitous decline, it has become an easy place for gentrifiers to overlook.

“By legitimizing certain ways that people live, they can participate in society,” says Victor Willis, executive director of the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC), a drop-in community centre near Sorauren Avenue. Early this year, PARC opened a supportive housing unit next door for members battling addiction and mental-health issues. The 1913 heritage building that contains the unit had become one of Toronto’s largest illegal boarding houses, with 55 rooms and fewer than 10 toilets; in 1998, a fire there killed two people and left 49 more homeless. Now renamed Edmond Place, the property boasts 29 self-contained, affordable apartments and a 50-year lease from the city.

When PARC first proposed Edmond Place at the end of 2006, there was considerable resistance from the Parkdale community. “I had been in office three days,” recalls Perks. “And I had to go to a meeting and listen to a group of residents complain that it would lead to low-income men standing on Queen Street smoking.”

Willis and his colleagues realized they could improve how they engaged with the neighbourhood, so they hired 10 ambassadors from the centre and sent them out to speak with business owners and residents on PARC’s behalf. “We shared our experiences with mental health or addiction,” says Terence Williams, an ambassador who himself struggled with mental illness and had been homeless for two years. “People learned that we were really involved here. There had been a lot of NIMBYism, but with most of the community, we went from a space of NIMBY to a space of YIMBY: yes in my backyard.” When Edmond Place held an open house in late 2010, nearly $10,000 was raised from the community through donations at the door.

As Parkdale’s existing neighbours have moved toward greater tolerance for all members of their community, new residents have also brought with them a sense of social conscience. Roger Riendeau, president of the Parkdale Residents Association, has seen an influx of young Torontonians in the area, buying houses or becoming renters. “What I’m impressed by is their more inclusive attitude,” he says. “I moved to Parkdale in 1983. The generation that lived here then would have been fearful of diversity, because they aspired to a more homogeneous Parkdale. But I’ve found the thirtysomething generation is moving in because of the diversity, rather than in spite of it. They like the nature of the community.”

Perks agrees. “No one in their right mind moves to Parkdale if they want everyone to look the same and act the same,” he says. “So there is a bit of self-selection that goes on.”

That’s true not just for the neighbourhood’s residents, but for the commercial space in the area, as well. Businesses are coming to Parkdale—50 new ones in the past two years, although at eight% the vacancy rate is four times as high as neighbouring Roncesvalles and West Queen West. Still, what’s opened here recently is a reflection of Parkdale’s complex makeup: a Tim Hortons, not a Starbucks; vintage shops like Philistine and more upscale restaurants like Keriwa Café; social services such as Edmond Place and the Breakaway methadone clinic.

The BIA’s Heather Douglas has noticed a concerted effort by new businesses to work with the character of Parkdale, not against it. “They’re not changing the face of Parkdale—they’re adding to what’s already here,” she says. “We’re not quite shiny. But we like that.” That’s why, she explains, when the BIA designed its new logo in 2009, the name Parkdale was written on an obvious slant. “It’s not exactly straight. It’s got its own edge.”

Not everything is exactly straight at Grand Electric, Parkdale’s new Mexican restaurant, either—likely because owners Ian McGrenaghan and Colin Tooke built much of it themselves, often after watching YouTube videos on how to operate power tools. An unframed map, tacked on the wall, is illuminated by a string of light bulbs; the striped napkins are actually IKEA tea towels. It all feels far less glossy, far more DIY than your typically gentrified bar.

“We want this restaurant to be as approachable and interesting as possible,” McGrenaghan says. “It’s rare to find a neighbourhood that’s not fully gentrified and that’s filled with nice, supportive people from all ends of the spectrum.” The appeal of the location, he says, is the people currently coming through the door, not the higher-income people who might swing by in a few more years. “I’m not blind to the fact that a condo is going up,” McGrenaghan says. “But we’re enamoured with Parkdale as it is now.”

Ah, yes, the condo. Ten years ago, Royal Queen Development purchased land at the southwest corner of Queen and Dufferin; this spring, it intends to break ground. Residents are watching that corner carefully, waiting to see if Q Loft is finally the harbinger of Parkdale’s long-anticipated gentrification. Probably not. “Almost 30 years of living in Parkdale has taught me that our diversity is not going away,” says the residents association’s Riendeau. When Q Loft presented its blueprints to the community, the community, characteristically, came back with ideas of its own: Instead of the proposed glass, a brick façade would better match Parkdale’s landscape; the majority of Q Loft’s eight stories should be stepped back from the street. Changes were made on the basis of this dialogue. And Q Loft says half of the 50-odd units already sold have been earmarked for rent, in keeping with Parkdale’s tenant-heavy composition.

Certainly, the condominium will have an effect on the area, and perhaps another developer will be tempted to follow suit. But any Parkdalian too concerned about Q Loft’s implications need only glance at the map it uses online to entice prospective buyers. The majority of restaurants, shops and services on Parkdale’s side of Dufferin have been left off entirely; instead, it stretches east, looping down to Liberty Village and extending all the way to Bathurst. Positioned next to fitness clubs, Trinity Bellwoods Park and the Drake Hotel, Q Loft stands conspicuously at the map’s westernmost edge. The condo has already found its gentrified neighbourhood.

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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960

Laurin & Natalie Jeffrey are Toronto Realtors with Century 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these articles, they just reproduce them here for people
who are interested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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